SEO Audits for Dummies

When I first started in this business, very few people knew what SEO was. “Search engine optimization” was a hard sell to businesses and few people really understood what it was, much less how to do it. Now, most businesses we work with know and understand the importance of SEO, but that’s also meant the market has been flooded with SEO’s who have no idea what they’re doing or web designers who “do SEO” but don’t do anything at all.

As a result, I wanted to share some easy tips on performing your own SEO audit. Whether or not you’re using an SEO agency or DIY-ing it, here are some things to look for to see if your SEO is effective and heading in the right direction.

Analytics. You should always start here. Some things to look at:

Are you getting reports at least monthly?

Are you looking at your traffic? Is it good quality?

Are they looking at lots of pages?

Where are they coming from?

Are they converting?

Titles and descriptions. Does each page have a custom page title and description that conforms to current best practices.

Titles should be 50-70 characters and focus on keywords first, then brand names

Descriptions should be 140-160 characters and should be compelling, use the keyword early in the sentence, and focus on proper spelling and grammar.

Images optimization. There is a lot related to images and video that you want to keep in mind.

Titles should be optimized. Avoid image titles like “IMG005325njkdf” and instead make them descriptive.

Utilize the alt attribute and fill it in with a keyword rich and clear title. Remember, Google can’t “see” your picture, so you have to be descriptive.

Make sure images are appropriately sized. Don’t use enormous photos, but make sure they aren’t pixelated. It’s a delicate balance.

Google is favoring JPG2000 as a file format right now for speed purposes. Consider switching to that instead of a huge PNG.

Content creation and freshness is really important. So, is new content being added to the site? Is there a blog or event calendar?

How often is it updated?

Is the content unique?

Does it focus on utility for customers/clients?

Link building. Using a tool like Majestic.com, how many backlinks does your site have.

How many did it have before?

Are people finding your content and sharing it?

What kinds of sites are linking to your content?

Tool check.

How many ranked keywords do you have now? Compare to the past.

How much of your traffic comes from organic sources? Compare to the past.

Run a site:mysite.com on Google to see how many pages have been indexed.

Check your top keywords and see where you fall in the SERPS.

That should get you started on your SEO journey and let you start the process of evaluating your SEO progress on a monthly (or quarterly) basis. If you’re interested in getting an SEO audit conducted on your site, contact us for more information and we can diagnose, analyze, and repair any existing SEO issues you may have.